Re-accelerate. Reinvent. Reboot | Executive Mentor | Tech COO, VP & PMO Head

I’ve spent most of my career inside companies when things were hard.
 
Scaling. Restructuring. Turning around operations under pressure. Managing growth across cultures, time zones, and incomplete information.

I’ve been a CEO, COO, President, and Global VP, leading teams across North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. I’ve carried the responsibility of $1B contracts and P&Ls up to $115M, and led major transformation programs impacting more than 6,000 people. Most recently, I ran an AI data company with 1,000+ people across Madagascar and Mauritius.
 
𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗜’𝗺 𝗴𝗼𝗼𝗱 𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘂𝗻𝗴𝗹𝗮𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗼𝘂𝘀 𝗺𝗶𝗱𝗱𝗹𝗲. 
When ambition runs ahead of structure.  When strategy exists, but execution doesn’t stick.  When the playbook is missing, and decisions still need to be made.
 
𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗜 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸 𝘁𝗼𝗱𝗮𝘆: 
I partner with a small number of founders, CEOs, and boards, often in AI and Global South contexts- to bring clarity, discipline, and momentum when complexity creeps in. 

• 𝗙𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗖𝗢𝗢 𝗼𝗿 𝗣𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗻𝘁: For companies in active transition.
• 𝗔𝗱𝘃𝗶𝘀𝗼𝗿/𝗧𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝗣𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗻𝗲𝗿: For high-stakes decision-making and scale.
• 𝗠𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗼𝗿: For Global South executives navigating Western capital markets.

I also write about AI, power, and leadership - specifically how emerging markets can scale without simply inheriting Northern tech assumptions. Most of that thinking lives here: 📬 https://ericraza.substack.com/

Born in Madagascar. Global Citizen. Fluent in French and English. Based in Montreal, and wherever the work requires.

𝗜𝗳 𝘆𝗼𝘂’𝗿𝗲 𝗻𝗮𝘃𝗶𝗴𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗴𝗿𝗼𝘄𝘁𝗵, 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗻𝘀𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻, 𝗼𝗿 𝗮 𝗺𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀 𝗻𝗼 𝗹𝗼𝗻𝗴𝗲𝗿 𝗳𝗶𝘁 𝗻𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗹𝘆, 𝘄𝗲’𝗹𝗹 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗮𝗯𝗹𝘆 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗮 𝗴𝗼𝗼𝗱 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻.

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🌍 🇲🇬 🇫🇷 🇨🇦 🇺🇸

Eric Raza

Founder and CEO Since Tomorrow

Over the last decade, my co-founder and I have been fashion ghost writers for some of the world's biggest celebs such as Rihanna and Zendaya, Instagram influencers, and creators.  After a decade of creating dozens of high quality, sold-out celebrity and influencer collections, Moore Collective has developed a digital framework oriented towards a creator’s bandwidth and the ever-changing needs of the digital consumer to bring in-demand, high quality content, physical / digital products and experiences to market efficiently, cost effectively and sustainably at the speed of&nbsp;TikTok and through content that entertains.As both seasoned entrepreneurs and F500 design, merchant, operations and sourcing leaders, we possess the rare ability and decades of loyalty with strategic global vendors to build both boutique and at volume end-to-end sourcing strategies within the same supply chain to scale lifestyle brands for creators.We have been repeatedly recruited as change agents to restructure internal design operations and external supply chains, we are known in the industry for bringing a bar-raising fashion product development ability to ensure the needs of on trend, high-quality, on margin product are met through constant communication and collaboration with direct management of the end-to-end value chain.AI puts our experience and methodology on rockets!

Joanna Williams

Amazon is planning an AI content marketplace - a hub where creators sell AI-generated video, image, and text assets

Let that sit for a second...

The company that redefined retail distribution is now building infrastructure for synthetic content commerce

Not as an experiment - as a marketplace

Because as I've been saying for 3 years - the AI +video arms race is about commerce

I've spent 13 years building creator commerce and trend forecasting infrastructure and 29 years building Fortune 500 supply chains

I've been writing about this exact convergence for years because the pattern has been screaming at anyone willing to listen (so literally no one in fashion!)

Or as Jeff Bezos always says "data tells us what is valuable and where to focus" 

Here's what Amazon sees correctly...

The digital asset economy is real - have you seen Seedance and Kling AI's latest models??

Prompts, templates, synthetic media aren't novelties

They're inventory

Amazon understands inventory better than anyone on Earth

Creators are the new supply chain

The same way Amazon aggregated physical sellers, they want to aggregate digital creators

It's the playbook they know

AI content is a commerce category, not a tech curiosity

This is Amazon treating generative AI the way they treated cloud computing in 2006 - as infrastructure worth owning

But here's what they're missing

A shelf doesn't know what belongs on it especially when we will have 1.1 billion creators by the end of the decade who can churn out hundreds of movies a day

Amazon is exceptional at distribution - getting the right thing to the right person once demand exists

But the digital asset economy doesn't work like physical retail

By the time a trend is searchable, it's already decaying

By the time a creator lists an asset on a marketplace, the cultural moment that made it valuable may have already passed

The gap isn't distribution

It's timing intelligence

The companies that will define this next era won't just host content for sale

They'll understand why something is culturally relevant, when it peaks, and how to connect creation to demand before the window closes

Amazon is building a warehouse for digital goods

The fact that they're entering this space validates my entire thesis... when the biggest retailer on earth starts building toward creator-generated AI content, it proves the market is real

But the actual value isn't in the warehouse

It's in knowing what to put in it and when- that's the real social commerce arms race Since Tomorrow

The good news is there's not a single broligarch who knows what the girls want to watch, make, or wear!!

Founder Since Tomorrow | LinkedIn Top Voice

From The Walt Disney Company's new CEO: "The future of media isn't just about what IP we own. It's about who shows up, where, and how we turn that into a decade-long relationship."

I've spent the last 29 years mapping the global vendor landscape across 33 markets for the highest quality brands and all lifestyle products - you will never find a Shein or Alibaba factory in my dataset

It comes in handy with agentic AI because it closes a pretty significant loop

*Studios have IP but no cultural intelligence pipeline
*Platforms have data but no direct manufacturing relationships  
*Manufacturers have production but no demand signals
*Creators have audience but no product infrastructure
*Retailers have distribution but keep 90% of the margin

The rare advantage is having all 5 connected and automated

It matters that Disney’s new CEO is a parks-and-experiences operator, not a streaming guy: the company is now led by someone whose P&L is literally who showed up, where, what did they do next, and how do you monetize it? 

Because Google and Meta just confirmed the AI arms race is in fact about commerce

The next step is giving leaders like that the infrastructure to see those signals across the entire internet - and route them straight into the factories, creators, and shelves that can respond in real time

Social listening doesn't solve today's problems

Knowing exactly where your IP is leaking and having the infrastructure to capture it does

I almost never post twice in a day, but this one deserved it

Paramount just announced they’re copying Netflix with short-form shoppable content

Cute idea, but the zeitgeist decides, not the broligarchs

Funny how these same players were MIA eight years ago when this shift was obvious

Sure, it validates my thesis - cultural commerce is finally mainstream - but I’m not convinced they understand why it works

Gen Z girls drive commerce, and ever since TikTok came under daddy’s control, the herd’s been scattering off platform

The center of gravity is already moving fast

Of course, AI’s in the picture too

Everyone’s betting the algorithm can predict taste

But AI isn’t a panacea, it just guesses wrong faster, and at scale

PVH Corp., Target, Paramount - everyone’s all in, yet we’re still living through our fourth year of historic inventory distortion and no one ever considers the actual consumer

The systems aren’t broken, they’re misaligned with culture

The lag between not yet possible and obviously possible has collapsed
​
The strategic advantage is pattern recognition and direct‑to‑consumer and manufacturer routing, because software‑as‑a‑service doesn’t make sense anymore

Once everyone has the same models, infrastructure, and code generation tools, the edge shifts from technical to real time cultural and commercial execution- who can see the signal first and route it all the way to shared value

It's about reading the whispers, then turning them into products, shared stories, and experiences before they’re legible to big tech

Speed of synthesis is the multiplier

The faster you can go from seeing something meaningful to a story, SKU, route to market, and a feedback loop, the less room there is for copy‑paste SaaS in the middle

This isn’t theory for us

We run a live market analysis across real time culture - classifying, and repricing across brands, then wiring that into the same system

No SaaS dashboard in the middle, just models and scripts pointed straight at culture, supply, and pricing

We just discovered 65k+ communities on a single "micro" trend lol

The distance between raw cultural noise and shovel‑ready concept is measured in minutes, not quarters

Our data already tells us who’s positioned to win the Ulta Beauty / Target breakup...

It's not enough to know that your competitor had a 50% sale last week
if you found out today

Your consumer has already moved on... 
​
It took decades of domain expertise to write the formula through AI tools this past year  - you can rent the models; you can’t rent orchestrating an end to end value chain since the 1990's with the same suppliers

Direct creator stores is the whole point

We’re not building infrastructure to hand the new owners of TikTok another two decades of lock‑in with way more at stake - we’re building the alternative, with economics that actually work for the creator

Oracle just erased $463B in market value

At the same time, every app can auto‑generate videos, podcasts, landing pages, apps, even entire series

The world doesn’t need more content

It needs proof and no it’s not about scraping what you think you know 

Over the last several weeks, a tiny team at Since Tomorrow built something different - 4 working cultural‑intelligence consoles for major IP universes that tie instant culture to commerce end‑to‑end

The first took 29 years and a month of 18‑hour days

The next 3 were instant

These aren’t decks - they’re live consoles where an IP owner can click into their worlds, see the thousands of niches and creators inside them, see what’s already selling (or failing), and trace every insight back to the original piece of content and product

AND INTERROGATE THEM LIKE A COMMAND LINE FOR YOUR ENTIRE UNIVERSE - EVERY HIDDEN NICHE IN THE DEEP TALE COMES BACK WITH A CONCRETE MOVE ATTACHED DIRECT TO MANUFACTURER 

Most fandom intelligence tools give you data and expect you to figure out what it means - our bespoke platforms gives you meaning and tells you what to do

That's where it's all headed - turning cultural data into cultural intelligence, delivered in a voice that sounds like it came from inside thousands of your fandoms themselves 

While Oracle and others pour billions into generic AI capacity, this is what AI looks like when it’s pointed to thousands of single universe with receipts...

Google's CEO showing up at the NRF for the first time ever tells you that the end game for the AI arms race is commerce and zuck just told investors he’s finally using his 21 years of data on us for yep… commerce to the tune of $135B!!!

The tax men are gonna crush brands guessing at culture instead of instrumenting it

Single or 2 person teams now have access to the same models as enterprises- but without bureaucracy and greed, they can ship values‑aligned systems that are built for creators, like we just did

This is not the future… it’s today 

Meta’s Andromeda update made creative and creator identity the targeting surface, and retail media networks are racing to bolt creators onto first‑party data from LTK to Walmart (who joined the$1T club today!), TikTok Shop, & Amazon

Everyone agrees creators move culture/product - but most still don’t keep the majority of the retail ticket they convert

That’s the gap this system is built to close - a live ledger that shows, in plain language, “this piece of culture drove this product to this person for this amount” - and a model where creators + IP owners keep most of that value

We already reached infinite content, brands must control the internets limiting factor - attention 

In a world where every app can generate a video, the only real moat left is understanding people deeply enough to map culture to commerce with receipts

If your AI wrapper agency can’t show you that chain -and doesn’t let you put hands on keyboards to query it - it's nothing more than a screenshot

The sudden spike in Expedition Luxe shows how IP, agents, + billing models collapse into new worlds

It’s Gorpcore after it discovered story; outdoor gear upgraded w/ a plot

It's not Arc'teryx or Salomon; it's on trend fashion styled like a field researcher 

The field jacket alone is up 73% in search

Too bad this Attico jacket is $1290

The outfit screams “I’m on an expedition,” even if you’re just at Acme

The funny part is the IP source - the visual language isn’t from a Paris runway, it’s from Universal Studios Hollywood ’90s blockbuster Jurassic Park

Dr. Ellie Sattler’s sun‑bleached linen, tied shirts, field belts, & dusty boots are outdated; creators have a new template they're remixing without naming the movie

And there are certainly no dinosaurs in her current world like mine

Universal accidentally built a character bible for 2026 social fashion - culture ran w/it while rights holders don't participate

The "new" aesthetic is really an IP memory leak - styling ideas escaping the franchise and reconstituting as a standalone vibe people are buying into right now for their starring role

Jurassic Park isn't just a movie, it's a wardrobe node that AI recommendation systems + agents are routing traffic through

It hits Hollywood hard

The industry still treats wardrobe as set dressing & merch as an afterthought, but Expedition Luxe is a portable, repeatable kit fans can replay in their own reels outside the IP

If studios don’t claim & extend those kits, creators + outdoor brands will - effectively fork their world

The IP owner funded the original archetype (Sattler, the field researcher), social fashion turned her into a viral template, and commerce routes around the studio, selling expedition pieces without mentioning dinosaurs or Universal

The IP is Jurassic, but the equity is leaking into digital natives and technical brands

Here's where it's all headed

Results‑as‑a‑service agents coming out of China show how fast buyers switch once they see labor‑shaped AI with outcome billing instead of seats and features

Expedition Luxe is the same move in culture: we’ve stopped paying for clothes and started paying for the job they do in personal lore

Hollywood no longer just sells stories; the next decade belongs to who bills for the worlds those wardrobes quietly put us to work in

Expedition Luxe isn’t a micro-trend; it’s the narrative, IP‑coded tip of a gorpcore/luxury‑outdoor market that’s already global & still climbing - Universal is capturing none of it

People are paying 4 figures not for technical performance on a mountain but to look plausibly on expedition - fashion as self‑casting rather than gear

Universal needs a real time direct to creator and manufacturer system to stop the leakage

Our platform mapped hundreds of Expedition Luxe opportunities compounding outside their system

There are whole worlds live online, billing themselves in real time, while the IP holders wait 18 months to approve a hoodie - make it make sense

BEWARE: Amazon is wiring the '97 bookstore play but with way more at stake

Everything is about to run through AI agents

If your agents don’t understand what’s happening in culture, content, & commerce right now, they won't be able to compete

K‑beauty multi‑use sticks are a perfect case study in what culture‑competent looks like

The untact beauty moment isn’t a microtrend

Multi‑use balms: oversized lip balms you swipe across cheeks, forehead, neck, & cuticles exploded as a touchless, on‑the‑go way to keep skin hydrated & glossy

Search for Wrinkle Bounce jumped from 100k to12M in a year; sales followed w/a flood of K-drama UGC calling it “that pink stick in every scene”

What started as a workaround is a new convenience standard

Balms aren't just trending - Since Tomorrow's agents see the pattern: “I don’t want to use my fingers,” “I’m on the move,” “I still want glass skin under a mask” all solved in 1 compact object

The real product isn’t in the INCI list

The top sticks repeat the same structure: salmon‑complex or collagen stories wrapped in oils, waxes, + emollients

Dermatologists say these big molecules mostly sit on the surface as occlusive moisturizers & sheen boosters, not anti‑aging

Budget sticks lean into shea/jojoba; premium ones have peptides, vitamin C, & plant complexes for a more scientific label

The functional backbone is boring: occlusive oils & waxes, a few recognizable actives, + texture that glides over makeup w/no pilling

The difference is in story, casting, distribution; not in a lab

Culture‑aware agents separate formula reality (barrier, shine, slip) from story reality (salmon DNA from Jeju) & help brands decide where to overinvest in R&D, where to keep it simple, and where to spend narrative capital

READ THAT AGAIN

Layer in Amazon who just announced its AI agents category is the fastest‑growing line in AWS history

Plus Amazon MGM just stood up an AI Studio to cut costs and speed up film and TV, built w/people from Pixar Animation Studios & the Big Bang Theory

Here's where it's headed all over again

Prime Video and Rufus own the surface where scenes/characters/merch become shoppable prompts

It's 97's bookstore play in plain sight

Culture runs on agents that live in AWS
Production runs through AI Studio
Merch routes through Prime/Rufus
Every step pays Amazon a toll until it's 45%

Also keep in mind Amazon's agentic commerces serves results to thier customers and purchases on their behalf on other branded sites (!!!)

So when I say agents need to be culture‑competent; I’m not being abstract

Amazon is wiring that competence into a new stack, at Hollywood scale w/people from Pixar Animation Studios + The Big Bang Theory and they'll spend $200B this year to own the market

Netflix is uniquely positioned...

If they own the agents that sit btwn fans & their IP, they can turn the same playbook into a flywheel that powers storytellers (& a new C2M economy!) vs taxing them

For years I’ve been saying creators are infrastructure and that the AI end game = commerce

So it is with great interest that NBCUniversal just announced they are bringing back their Creator Collective for the 2026 Winter Olympics

The legacy licensing slide I created below tells you why this matters

The traditional pipeline is a 12-18 month leak - studios have such glorious IP but licensees and manufacturers spend up to a year and a half grinding through contracts and production, retailers get 30-60 days on shelf, and by the time a product finally appears, the cultural moment that made it matter has already died

Less than a single‑digit slice of cultural commerce potential is captured -  the rest evaporates into fast-fashion dupes, fan-made products with zero studio revenue, and trends that die before official merch arrives and creators who sparked the trend see low teens commissions at best 

The system is optimized for risk management, not resonance - the opposite of what's happening in AI

Individuals are creating AI stacks with all your niche fandoms that cost 98% less, and they’re doing it without asking permission 

The constraint is no longer labor, it’s how well you design the machine and help people succeed

Meanwhile, Amazon just pushed past $830B in GMV(!!!) - 53% from the U.S. alone - wonder how much of your IP is in that #

I don't have to...

Search is now a zero‑click funnel where 80%+ of queries end w/out leaving the results b/c AI overviews answer the question on the spot

In that environment, brand w/out real relationship is not discoverable

If you’ve never actually gotten to know HER - and it is a her, the women who drive 85-90% of consumer commerce and are now world‑building in public -  your agents will be outcompeted by operators who understand her language, niches, and timelines TODAY

Her worlds and rituals they host are the context layer AI uses to decide what to show, recommend,  sell

Google’s announcument today toward local resonance + video 1st results validates it

The index is now geo‑anchored, creator‑driven, & measured by interaction, + deep contextual answers 1:1

The differentiator isn’t taste b/c that's personal - it's architecture x speed

The phone home screen is turning into a grid of interactive media where every post is a tiny piece of software, vibe‑coded via prompts and wired directly to outcomes

In that reality, it's silly to think creator stores are merch drops

Each properly tagged storefront is a programmable node rooted in a specific place, community, &  shared interest; emitting high‑signal data; wired directly to local online shops, or on‑demand manufacturing in real time

Agents on the culture side + agents on the inventory side negotiate, collapsing the 12-18 month leak into continuous matching btwn what the world is feeling & what the network can ship

It's time to understand her world in real time b/c while TikTok weakened retailer-owned channels - AI agents will decimate them

Bad Bunny for way more than the Superbowl win!!!

Most major musicians like Bad Bunny earn 10-25% of the revenue they generate (so fcked up!!!)

The labels take all an artist's wealth

Bad Bunny refused to play that game

Through Rimas Music, he gets approximately 90% of his revenue 

Because distribution SHOULD NEVER NOT EVER NEVER equal ownership

He played the long game, refusing the upfront bigger check

I think it's safe to say after Sunday's show that his identity is his moat and it's now generating pretty signficiant demand from his audience that everyone's gonna want to rent

THIS IS WHERE IT'S ALL HEADED!!

You can’t hide the truth when you’re responsible for delivering hundreds of thousands of raw materials, samples, & billions of SKUs

In 2008 we were still doing this in Excel (unfortnately that is mostly still true today!)

Every cross‑functional partner was the gatekeeper to their own little island of truth or excuse

No shared definition of complete or accurate

No visibility into what the baton pass actually looked like

The whole thing was built for status meetings, not outcomes

It got so bad we literally found 27 different versions of the same PO floating around with everyone blaming the person behind them

I did the only thing that made sense to me at the time and it pissed a lot of people off

I put in a shared, transparent booking tool & WIP, and turned the whole company into a live dashboard 

Turns out the CEO was tired of 27 excuses per style too

One source of truth - if it wasn’t in the WIP, it didn’t exist

For the 1st 30 minutes every day, each team sat down & logged the previous day exactly as it happened

No "we’re on track" theatre - just #'s + outcomes

If something slipped, it showed up - if anyone blew a date, it showed up

The point was simple: see the risk early enough that you’re not surprised when the all‑door flip is suddenly 2 months late

That was day one at Club Monaco as head of Product Development & Production 

Within months, we went from 100% late to 100% on time, from chronic IMU misses to consistent, high‑quality hits

What pissed me off is the Ralph Lauren took my little cashmere factory

It wasn’t magic, we just turned chaos into a real‑time truth of what actually happened today

Most tools still stop at what happened...

I care deeply about the layer that remembers why we did what we did - so the next time the pattern shows up, you’re not back to 27 versions

I care about the new chain TREND → DECISION → ACTION → OUTCOME → LEARNING and making it queryable in real time

In commerce, this matters more than anywhere else

Traditional tools can tell you that a character, #, creator is spiking if you know to look for it

Social listening platforms see the smoke long after the fire has started & has been tagged

The institutional memory of why we routed this signal to that IP and those products through those people is tribal, fragile, & non‑existent at query time

When the next pattern rhymes with the last one, there’s no shared graph of precedent to lean on - just gut feel and whoever remembers the last crisis

Oh the stories I can tell like the time the Gap NA team failed to place their holiday merino order for Int'l markets when I took over in late Sept...

The opportunity now is to treat decisions themselves as 1st class data

The incumbents will keep their current systems of record, they’re too deeply wired into their legacy ways

But the real leverage will sit one layer above, in the engines that remember why we did what we did, learn from it, and quietly steer the next trillion dollars of cultural commerce

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